Sometimes I feel I’m part of a very small club of people who’ve actually set aside time to ask whether American libertarianism is ridiculous after all.
You don’t have to remind me how cool and self-affirming it feels to identify outside of the two-party spectrum. My own stomach churns at being called a Democrat or the insinuation that I see President Barack Obama as a hero when he is little more than a mere part-time convenience.
Let’s not overshoot the target though. I value extra-partisan sensibilities when they actually offer criticism of the ideological failures that frame contemporary Liberal (capital L) democracy. But libertarianism is too busy reinforcing that very same social order that fails to maintain its integrity under its own weight.
I recognize in libertarianism either an unacknowledged ignorance of social being or a peculiar denial of social being. It’s inherent in the notion of freedom as “freedom from others.” But the existence of society itself puts this idea of freedom on ice. As consumers in a marketplace, our decisions create an entire culture of capitalism and a shared standard of how we are expected to behave “morally” within capitalism.
The assumptions that animate this individualist social order are false. It insists that success is rooted in materialism. Deviation from this model of success is frowned upon, and the deviants are labeled as ambitionless leeches. It tells us to disregard the poor as failures in the game of capitalism who don’t deserve societal support, even though our economy is structured to rely on permanent, inexpensive labor either in this country or overseas.
The harmony of society is interactive, so liberty as “freedom from others” is culturally idolatrous. Nobody consumes or produces free from others. Nobody provides or receives services, economically or socially, free from others. Nobody LIVES free from others. We are all involved in an interconnected social web where actions in the aggregate have very real, sometimes very negative, consequences. Libertarianism leaves us denying a much more fundamental human desire than capitalism itself — addressing societal conflicts through the shared benefit of collective action. Libertarianism relies on social cooperation for all of its success while paying none of its dues. It is in hate with itself.
What we have to understand is that there is no single, universally shared, unconscious idea of “freedom” that we all strive for. It is a fiction. Freedom is not a static entity for us to covet and whose evolution we resist. It is dynamic. Our understanding of freedom changes, from moment to moment and across generations, ideologies and social groups. It is an ongoing march of conflict and progress. It has evolved to include other fundamental agreements of modern lifestyle – infrastructure, social justice, fairness and equality. American society already finds itself far more in tune with these values than libertarianism would enable.
How we discuss freedom should not begin and end with the Founding Fathers, but libertarianism, at least as Ron Paul presents it, is always looking backward. And I am always suspicious of an ideology that asks us to “Remember when times were good.” No, times were always awful in one way or another.
I approach libertarianism through the question of whether we will structure society around a rigid ideology that enables and relies on social inequities among other social deformities, or will we structure society around getting the results we actually wanted in the first place? I am not begging libertarians to be receptive to such a critique. We hold different values and different opinions. But please don’t be juvenile and insist that I haven’t thought about this before.
